Kim Vallee just published a post on What to Consider Before Creating a Facebook Business Page. I suggest you read it to follow the right process in creating a Facebook page for your business.

The Rules of Engagement

As Kim mentions, I often receive Facebook friend requests from brands and businesses. Sorry, but for me and many others, friends are real persons. For businesses, Facebook created pages for which people can become fans. It is important to mention that personal accounts on Facebook are subject to Facebook’s terms of use where it is stated:

• 4.1 You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.
• 4.2 You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).

Facebook Pages are also governed by interesting terms:

• 12.1 Pages are special profiles that may only be used to promote a business or other commercial, political, or charitable organization or endeavor (including non-profit organizations, political campaigns, bands, and celebrities).
• 12.2 You may only administer a Facebook Page if you are an authorized representative of the subject of the Page.

So clearly, Facebook Pages are meant for businesses. Using personal profiles for commercial purposes could easily get you banned. Additionally, personal accounts are clearly meant for persons.

Protecting Brand Ownership

I know many agencies and friends that help small businesses and larger companies manage their Facebook presence. If you do so, it is important that you protect the ownership of the Facebook Page for the client.

As Kim mentioned, to create a Facebook Page, you need a personal account. You can add administrators to a page, but the Page creator will always keep ownership of the Page. It is not well known that administrators cannot remove the page creator from the list of administrators. It’s an easy mistake to create a Facebook page from your own profile. Don’t do it!

If you need to create a page for a small business owner or founder, it might not be a mistake to register the Facebook Page under his/her personal account. Even then, you never know what might happen. The business might sooner or later be transferred to someone else in the family or be bought in the future. The new owners will lose control of the Facebook Page.

For larger businesses, it’s evident that it’s a problem. The CEO/president is probably not there forever and employees come and go. So, under which personal account should the Page be created to ensure future ownership of the Facebook Page?

I asked my friend Clara Shih who wrote the excellent book: “The Facebook Era” about this Catch-22 problem. She answered:

“Good question. We recommend companies set up a new personal Facebook account for Admin User, and then keep this login/password for whoever at the company is managing the Page(s). Does that make sense?”

I replied to her that it might put us in a grey zone as to Facebook’s terms of use. Her answer:

“Yes, but it is the only way we have figured out to get around this!”

So, here you have it from an expert on the subject!

Based on that, we recommend that you create a personal profile for the company. Also create a specific email from the company domain to log into the account and to ensure future ownership. As a disclaimer, we must note that it probably goes against Facebook terms of use. You are warned: do not knock at our doors if a company profile gets banned! However, since there are no other good workarounds yet and that Facebook hasn’t solved the problem, I suppose it can be considered an acceptable use.

To avoid potential problems, Kim had great suggestions: make sure the profile is totally private and hidden on Facebook through privacy settings. Manage your Facebook Page by adding appropriate administrators (employees for the business or the agency). Since you won’t ever really be using this personal account (give the email and password to appropriate company officers) risks are low it would be banned.

Just a quick note to announce that our VP, Kim Vallee will be a speaker at PodCamp Montreal this weekend. Based on her experience running At Home with Kim Vallee, she will focus on what it takes to create great blog content. She will discuss what works today to grow your traffic and free ways to monitor the social conversations. Her Top Tips for Better Blogging presentation will be at 10 am Saturday, September 19th, 2009.

After lunch on Saturday, Kim will participate in a Top Blogger Panel. It will be a chance to hear four Montreal-based bloggers that concentrate on design and arts. Michelle Sullivan has assembled a panel made of Éric Bolduc, Gabrielle Chalifoux, Cindy Laverdière and Kim Vallee.

Both presentations will be live streamed in case you cannot attend PodCamp Montreal 2009.

MORE:
+ Details of Kim’s conferences
+ Schedule of PodCamp Montreal 2009 – you must register first to attend. It’s free

You can click on the slides below to better follow the presentation.

The Slides

More precisely, Jérôme Paradis and Kim Vallée addressed the how, the why and the benefits of carrying out a large-scale migration, including why you would move to Wordpress, demystifying the good and the bad of changing all our URLs, migration tools and techniques and a migration checklist.

I wish to tell you that they are actually 8 videos from WordCamp Montreal 2009 on WordPress TV.

Basic questions that any brand would ask before they start are:

• How do I find the influencers on my market?
• Which social networks my customer base are using and at which frequency?
• How do you track all mentions of your brand?
• How many resources it will take and who should do the job?
• How do I track the effectiveness of my tweets?

You will find on Mashable, a list of Tweeter Tools for the Enterprise that can help you answer these questions. Start with the integrated Twitter search to track the mentions of your brand or a few keywords. You can saved the search requests on your Twitter account. Doing that saves you time.

I would add to Goggle what you are looking for as they are many small niche sites that gathered topic-related tweets or Tweeple. They give you a head start on who to follow.

The A/B testing tips using hashtags is a wonderful idea that is so simple to implement. Like Sudha Jamthe mentioned on Mashable, you can use it to test the effectiveness of your message, test what time and day brings you the best results or analyze the effectiveness on different audience segments.

MORE:
+ Corporate Twitter Toolbox: Twitter Tools for the Enterprise by Sudha Jamthe on Mashable

This story is a quick lesson on building an online community. Repeat after me: it takes time and energy. You cannot expect to create an engaged community overnight. Every successful blogger will tell you, you built it one reader at a time. But big corporations often do not have that patience.

Many corporations put lots of money and resources in launching an initial campaign, get good results only to see their community fades away. It is common in the corporate structure to publish in one shot all the content they have. Big corporations act slower then the pace of the social media. Therefore, they are often unable to publish new content fast enough to encourage their readers/fans to come back. This is why I adviuce any new blogger to keep a few posts unpublished when they are starting out. But there is more to that.

On Social Media Today, Rachel Happe compared building an online community to making a risotto. When you are making a risotto, you add a ladle of water at a time, let the rice absorbs the water and then add more liquid. Our president, Jerome Paradis is an expert at making risotto. He cooks the best risotto I ever had. Jerome will tell you that you need to massage the rice as it absorbs the water. It is the same for building a community. You need to nurture it for it grows into something dynamic and engaging.

MORE:
+ Growing a Community on Social Media Today
+ Asparagus, Mint and Lemon Risotto recipe

The fact of the matter is people consume news differently and from other sources than newspapers. I find it mesmerizing that they struggle to change in order to serve the public the way the public wanted to be served. By embracing the new technology and remember than their role is to deliver news, not a paper, they could see that the new reality provides them with lots of opportunity for growth.

I suggest these two excellent posts on the challenge of the newspapers industry:
+ Online Coverage is Harder to Get, or is it? on Conversation Agent
+ 12 Things Newspapers Should Do to Survive on Mashable

I only wrote about IDEO’s Innovative Ideas on the Future of Journalism on my social media blog. For three weeks, a team of media-savvy IDEOers met day and night, scribbled and scrapped ideas about the future of journalism. Pretty cool ideas emerged from this huge brainstorm session.

I read on Mashable yesterday their 10 Things You Must Do to Earn Your Audience’s Trust. I often made similar recommendations to people. I feel that some points needs clarification or adjustments. Here are my insights on some points.

Tell us who you are

I would add that you should say what topics you will discuss, what is your angle. If you run a blog, do not make it only about your brand. For example, Paradivision creates social media applications but our blog covers social media news and trends for business.

Don’t setup a profile on every network

I do not recommend to write the exact same message on all the network. I stay away from tools to publish the same updates on many networks; doing that only creates noise. If you wish to engage in a conversation with your customers, you must be willing to make the time.

I often spread the same stories on Twitter and Facebook. But I will use different sentences to do it. On Twitter, my followers may have never met me. There are more chances that I have at least met you once if we are Facebook friends. For that reason, I use different words to talk to each audience. In Facebook, I use the link and comment features to publish richer content.

Know that news spread more and die faster on Twitter. I find LinkedIn to be a passive social network. But some people like it. Try it to see if it is for you.

Write for the Word

Writing short posts is crucial. Aim for posts between 200 and 400 words. People do not have the time to read longer stories. If you wish to cover several angles, split the story in a series of posts. Each post must stand on its own.

Document Everything

I wish to point out that text is more SEO friendly than video. So even if you post a video, you need to include some text in your post. Use videos to complement what you are saying, to bring a topic or to document an event. It works great for quick interviews. Keep your videos under 2 minutes but aim for 1:30 minutes. It needs to be short for people to watch your video.

Web 2.0 is about sharing and engaging. Upload your videos on You Tube or Vimeo. You want to give bloggers a chance to spread the words and embedded your video into their story.

+ Photo by Jerome Paradis showing an improvised session at PodCamp Boston 4, that happened last weekend

• ComScore Media Metrix’s year-end report: Women’s community was the most visited and fastest growing Internet category, tied with politics. The number of unique visits to women’s community sites jumped 35% to almost 70 million from 52 million. This is quite an achievement considering the US Presidential race.
• InsideFacebook: Two days ago (in September 2008), a new survey shows that women outnumber men on Facebook in every age group.

The most current Facebook statistics look like this

What it interesting is that reality is still holding. It has been true month after month. Women are truly embracing social media. The only social networking site where there is more men than women is LinkedIn.

Anderson Analytics’ Social Network Sites A&U Profiler Survey

The first conclusion that is interesting for a marketing viewpoint or if you wish to have your own social network application is to look at how men and women use SNS. You can read from the press release on that particular SNS study the following:

While male and female SNS users engage in similar activities online, the survey found that males are more likely to share information about their hobbies, interesting articles or work-related topics. Female users in general are more likely to share photos, information about what they are currently doing or posts about their pets.

Social network sites vary in popularity based on ages. From that you can see that the older generations use mostly Facebook and Twitter. The Generation X and the WII generation are the most active on Twitter. Overall, Facebook is the most popular site, followed by My Space, Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus, Facebook members were the most loyal among regular users.

Anderson Analytics published the results of an interesting survey in mid-July 2009 about SNS habits and user profiles. The survey reached 5000 users in the United States. The average ages are not too far apart. The survey found that MySpace has the youngest user group (29 yrs old), while LinkedIn’s audience is the oldest (36 yrs old). Facebook users have on average 34 years old while the average age on Twitter is 33.

It came to no surprises that people in different age groups use social networking sites (SNS) for the different reasons. We see that survey after survey. After all, generation gap and different lifestyles play a role in how people uses SNS.

MORE:
+ New Social Media Study: Facebook Trumps Other Social Media as Most Valuable; Majority of Users Can’t Do Without Popular Site on Tom H. C. Anderson
+ How the Old, the Young and Everyone in Between Uses Social Networks on eMarketer

+ If you are not convinced of the popularity of social media, have a look at more than 20 mind-blowing social media statistics. The 250 million Facebook users have a high level of participation. More than 120 million Facebook users log on to Facebook at least once a day and more than 30 million users update their statuses at least once a day. 50% of all Twitter updates are published using mobile and Web-based tools. Twitter is my social media when I am on the go.

+ Mitch Joel of Six Pixels of Separation shared how some brands use Twitter to listen, discover problems and act on it without posting a single tweet. Twitter is a wonderful tool for customer service research. Even if the high level management is not ready at your company to actively interact in social media, it does not mean that you should do nothing. Remember that just monitoring what people say about your brand is useless if you do not act on based on the information you gathered. Read How Big Business Is On Twitter Without Being “On Twitter”.

+ If you are thinking of tapping into the social game industry, know that 1 In 10 Internet Users Buys Virtual Goods. According to a survey released yesterday, 12 percent of Americans said that they spent real money on virtual items in the last year. Via Information Week

+ One big news on the technology side was the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal to try to better compete against Google supremacy on the search engine market. You will find some key facts about the deal on Mashable.

+ Looking at the avatar of my friends, I say that that the “Mad Men Yourself” microsite launched Wednesday created attention for the AMC’s TV series. I am a fan of the show. People use the head shot as an avatar on Facebook or Twitter. You can also swell your body image on your iPhone or on your Facebook profile. Or if you are still into that, display the scene on your desktop.

+ One thing that I am not convinced yet that it was a worthy investment for Eight O’Clock Coffee. It is the brand that fuelled (i.e. sponsored) the microsite. AMC approached them to sponsor the Mad Men Yourself microsite. Out of curiosity, I am running a small Twtpoll at the moment to gauge if people have noticed the Eight O’Clock Coffee’s sponsorship. So far, no one answered Yes. I need more votes for a proper assessment. Voting will be open until August 1st. Vote or see the results at http://twtpoll.com/r/l4u99j